Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Harley2g,

Instead of the domain at the end of each title tag, I would just put the company (or website) name.

For example:

Keyword 1 | Keyword 2 | Company Name

I wouldn't put the ".com" at the end of the title tags.

Hey guys,

I was wondering if any of you could help me with this. Basically one of our clients will host a competition on their website soon. Once a visitor completed the entry form I would like to have social media buttons on that page that automatically place text into your social media account if you chose to "share" or "tweet" your entry.

For example it could automatically place "I have just entered to win .... You should try it out as well!" into the twitter or Facebook posting field.

I have tried looking around, but honestly I am not sure what the look for.

How could this be achieved or what it is called?

Thank you

Hi LittleBigMan,

I actually do record every link that I want to target and achieve. Basically I make a large list with the websites I want to target along with contact details. I then jot down whether I contacted them or not + if I achieved gaining a link on the website. I think it's good to keep track of the links you gain, for example if you once contacted a website and they said that they would link to you, but then forgot about it, you can quickly shoot them back an email to remind them (if that makes sense). Another reason to record the links down is if you come across a website in the future that you like, you can quickly check in the spreadsheet whether you or a workmate have contacted the website in the past, as it may be a waste of time contacting them again.

Also, some clients enjoy seeing the links you gained in their monthly report.

Good luck!

Hi Zachary,

I enjoyed reading http://www.google.com/grants/education/Google_Analytics_Training.pdf

Talks about goals and conversions quite in-depth. Just skip the first section as you'll be aware of it already.

Best of luck.

Hi Media Owl,

Check out http://pages.ebay.com.au/help/sell/searchstanding.html

It talks about improving your search standings.

Best of luck.

Hi Project#Labs,

I personally find the webinars from Distilled well worth watching. You can subscribe to their newsletter on http://www.distilled.net/training/ and they will once in a while mail you a video to watch.

Also, we bought the "Link Love 2011: Link Building Seminars Video Bundle" a while ago, which was definitely worth its money. Be sure to check it out if you have the chance. I'll probably end up purchasing the LinkLove 2012 vids some time soon.

Best of luck.

Hi Scott,

If you believe that Open Site Explorer doesn't show every single link (which may well happen), you can always double check a website  by using the following tools:

• Majestic SEO (very very good)

• Ahrefs

• Raven Tools

I believe the best one is still the link report you can find in Google Webmaster Tools (with Majestic SEO second), but as you say, that is not always an option.

Best of luck.

Hey LittleBigMan,

Rand actually had a whiteboard friday in regards to Search Suggest: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-googles-search-suggest-instant-works-whiteboard-friday

Should help you out.

Thank you for that answer,

Bit silly that it isn't available to the public, can't think of a reason why they would do this.

Hey guys,

Could someone please tell me how the SEOMoz team were able to add a graphic on their Twitter profile (https://twitter.com/SEOmoz) underneath their followers?

It's the graphic of the plane flying.

When I go to the Twitter settings, I only seem to find how to change the background of the profile, nothing in regards to adding a graphic on that spot.

Thanks!

Don't worry about the profile link (if thats what you meant) showing up or not in OSE, they have been nofollow links for quite some time now, so it doesn't really matter anyway (although it does look good course in OSE!).

The same happens to use for some clients, for some of them the Twitter links shows up and for others they don't.

I would say so (depending which seo efforts were undertaken of course).

Also I have noticed myself that for some our clients our traffic has gone up, due to competitors being crushed by the penguin update.

Hi LittleBigMan,

Your best bet finding out where your traffic is coming from is checking your Analytics (which hopefully has been setup?).

On the left you'll be able to go from Traffic Sources -> Search -> Organic. On this page you'll see all the keywords that have brought you in traffic organically.

Also check under the referrals tab to see if BOTW and Yahoo are bringing you any traffic.

Best of luck!

Hi seochump,

There are 2 reasons I can think of the top of my head. First of all sofware such as OSE can take a while to crawl (and find) websites, before finding out what backlinks are pointing to it. Due to this, it may appear that some sites have 0 backlinks to it, while in reality it could have lots. You mentioned, that a lot of times the page has a page authority of 1, usually means (to me anyway) that OSE hasn't picked the site up yet.

Secondly, I have noticed while working for several clients, that whenever a new site comes up, it "could" shoot up to the top of the rankings, before it being dropped off to several pages. New sites come and go onto the first page rather quickly. So perhaps it could be that.

Hi,

I haven't heard of any info-graphic distribution services that may be out there. However if you do have the time, doing it yourself can be fairly simple and often highly rewarding. Instead of explaining steps that could be undertaken myself, check out the article below by John Pring. He seems to be a master of infographics and their distribution.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/getting-the-maximum-number-of-links-from-your-infographic

Best of luck.

It looks to me that the site could be recently created.

I've had new websites created which took months to be picked up by OSE (although contacting the SEOMoz help team and notify them accelerated the inclusion quite a lot)

Good day guys,

We got a restaurant that is changing its name and domain.

However they are keeping the same server location, same content and same pages (we are just changing the logo on the website).

It just has to go a new domain. We don't want to lose the value of the current site, and we want to avoid any duplicate penalties.

Could you please advise of the best practices of doing a domain name change?

Thank you.

Hi CFSSEO,

I would suggest reading the following:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/wrong-page-ranking-in-the-results-6-common-causes-5-solutions

Might help you fix your problem.

Regards

Hi Sherohass,

I would contact support at help@seomoz.org, it looks like it's an error on their end.

Good luck.

Hi David,

If there are way to many bad links to remove, it is probably a good choice to invest in a link removal service (can save time and money). I myself haven't had any need to use one, but recently at an SEO conference we were advised by specialists to use an online tool named RMOOV (http://www.rmoov.com/) which they recommended if you have some link cleaning to do. There is a free option as well to give it a shot with 1 campaign.

Regards

Good day ge0173400,

Basically canonical was created to tell Google that if you 2 or more pages that have the same content, which page with that content you want Google to focus on.

For example you have 3 pages regarding gold fish. All 3 pages have nearly the exact same content except the species of gold fish. All of a sudden you have duplicate content now. It is then up to you to decide which page you would like to get the most value (let's say page 1). You then put a canonical link on pages 2 & 3 pointing to page 1. This means that when Google crawls pages 2 & 3 it will find out that it should focus on page 1.

If the above is confusing, definitely have a look at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps It does a great (and better) job of explaining canonical.

Best of luck.

Hi tgr0ss,

If you chose for website URL that consists of keywords, it still carries some ranking weight (not much though, and it will decrease over time). Myself, I prefer the company name as the URL, as it good for branding and it doesn't look like you are trying to force your rankings to go higher.

In regards to your titles, each page should have an unique title tag. As you are pro member, you can see in your campaigns that there are "Duplicate Page Title" errors. What I prefer is the following structure:

Keyword 1 | Keyword 2 | Company Name

Keyword 1, Keyword 2 | Location | Company Name

And be sure to keep the length of the title tag under 70 character, so it won't be shortened in the search results.

Best of luck!

Hi David,

If you are willing to spend money, then the above is a very good way to go about finding what keywords your competitors are ranking for. Just to clarify, the tool I listed above is free (choose the demo option), the only thing what differentiates the free and paid version, is that the paid version allows you to bring up fancy (and customizable) ranking reports, and it allows you the save the keywords you entered so you can re-check it easier next time. What I just do is save the keywords in an excel file and just copy/paste it each time into the tool. Ranking reports can easily be made yourself anyway and the "hassle" of copy/pasting keywords into the tool for me isn't worth buying the pro version..

Fingers crossed that SEOMoz will have it one day!

Regards

Good day David,

The above information is great. What I could add though is if you add competitors into Open Site Explorer, there is an "Anchor Text" tab you can click, which often shows what keywords they are trying to rank for. It could also be possible that the website might have a meta keywords (even though they were outdated years ago). To access these, go to their website and check their source (ctrl+u), then look for the meta keywords line.

Once you have a general list of keywords that you think they are trying to rank for, instead of manually checking yourself with Google, I use the following software (http://www.link-assistant.com/rank-tracker/). Even with their free version, you can enter any URL, followed by a list of keywords you would like to see the rankings of.

Good Luck

Hi Harry,

If you do external link building you should not focus your anchor text on one or two chosen options (such as "diamond engagement"). Since the release of the penguin update, a lot of website have actually been penalized as their link profiles contained anchor texts that were purely their keywords that they want to rank for (looks super dodgy to Google). When building link, switch the anchor text around often to non-keyword ones such "click here" or "click here to access website", "company website" (just general ones).

I believe (not a 100% certain) that I once read that the anchor text with keywords you want to rank for, should be about 30% of the overall anchor texts used in your link profile.

Best of luck.

Hey guys,

I read this article this morning on SEL. Not sure what to think about it.. Matt did have a point that a lot of infographics are of bad quality (even with wrong information present at times) , and hence don't deserve to gain links from it. But how could Google possible know whether the infographic itself is of high quality or not??

http://searchengineland.com/cutts-infographic-links-might-get-discounted-in-the-future-127192

Hi Lucy,

Like-wise as Robert, I myself have used hootsuite before for several social media complaints. Besides a huge outage at an important time, I didn't really mind using the service (took a small while getting used to it, that's all).

I suggest you read http://www.seomoz.org/blog/url-shortener-owl-li-indexed-in-google (was released today, excellent timing) as well, which actually talks about using one of the URL shorteners provided by Hootsuite.

Best of luck.

The above is great, however I believe external SEO isn't the case here (if I understood it right).

Since they will design and develop the website, be sure to ask what on-page optimization they will do for your website. They (if they are good) should be aware and experienced with optimizing the title tags, meta description, on-page content, and website navigational structure (which includes re-directs).

Best of luck!

I find http://ubersuggest.org/ to be a fun and useful tool to generate keywords.

Hi Gaydon,

This should help you out:

https://developers.google.com/+/plugins/badge/#faq-find-page-id

Regards

Hi Jon,

If you want to use Google+ for your company, you first have to make a normal personal account (with or without a picture of your face, I just left mine blank) before you can make a business page.

Once your personal account is set-up you can create a business page (under Pages), which you can customize fully for your company (company logo etc.) Doing this won't get you penalized at all.

Best of luck.

Hi James,

Thank you very much for that article you linked to, I didn't even notice that it was actually doing that. What we did now is just get rid of that orange "share" button as a whole, and only keep the Twitter/FB and G+ ones (that don't link back to AddThis).

Thanks for your help!

Good day guys,

Just a quick question. By having the AddThis sharing tool to share content such as blogs, does it still send the same social signals to Google as you would get by having the official Facebook/Twitter plug-ins?

Regards

It might be worth checking out the following keywords, which are from the top of my head:

• buy japanese candy

• order japanese candy

• buy japanese candy online

• japanese candy online

• japanese candy online shop

• japanese candy store

• japanese candy store online

• japanese candy order

Some of the above might be useful.

Good luck!

Hi Bob,

I have done some soliciting myself for a free finance resource website, which went quite successful. Basically, the main aspect you should focus on is explaining to them the value that your website can bring to theirs. Go into specific details on why exactly your website should belong on theirs. For example, do you have fantastic content that they and their visitors should know about? If you can, let them know if you had any success cooperating with a major site, as it helps enlarging your credibility.

Also, at the start of the email, just let them know that you enjoy visiting their website (whether it's the look or the information given), they always seem to appreciate that.

Good luck!

Hey Moosa,

I just double checked for you at both Google.com.au and Google.com and setalks is actually indexed.

When I searched for "setalks", it is at the top of the results as following:

SE Talks.com – Where we talk about SEO, Social and Inbound

Not sure why you believe the domain isn't indexed?

Hey Qon,

If it can be of any help, the following post helps you find out the amount of backlinks (categorized by Domain Authority) that are pointing to a website.

http://www.johnfdoherty.com/three-phenomenal-excel-spreadsheets-for-link-analysis

I can't help you with the MozRank however.

Regards

G'day John,

Currently our PA/DA is higher than all other sites that are on the first page for keywords such "spray booth" and "spraybooth". Besides that, we have more links than the others as well.  The only reason I can think of is that they are ranking higher then us due to their domain age?

Also, link building has been steadily.

Thank you for your suggestions!

Good day guys,

We have been following strict SEO strategies for the past 6 months, all sites have been improving incredibly well, all except one. The site in question is http://bit.ly/IH4pkM . The site is regarding automotive spray booth equipment. We were ranking on the first page for the keyword "spray booth" (which is the most important one), at place #4 for weeks on end. However since half-way last week, the site has been dropped to half-way the second page (#17).

There are barely any crawler errors listed for our campaign on SEOMoz. There were several pages of which the meta description was missing, but that has been fixed earlier this week. When it comes to link building, I looked at what the top competitors were doing, and was looking for unique link building opportunities myself. We have received 0 webmaster tools warnings as well.

I do not believe we are penalized due to the "penguin" update. After all, if you search for for the company's name in Google, it is still listed on there (# 2). Nor have we been part of dodgy link networks at all.

So my question is, what do you guys believe made us drop the rankings? Is there some on-page issues I am overlooking? Any recommendations to restore out previous rankings?

Kind Regards,

Roderic

There is one website I could definitely recommend, it is called "My Blog Guest" (http://myblogguest.com/)

It is founded by Ann Smarty, who has been featured here on SEOmoz and she is also a member on here. Basically, the website offers the opportunity to look for blog guest writers as well as offering articles to other blog owners. The site is easy to use and pick up.

If you are willing to pay though you could check out sites such as oDesk (as mentioned by Ben). Do be aware though that you look at their ratings, their native language and the amount of experience they have. We once trialed on there looking for a writer, the content we received however was very very poor (although the person's ratings on oDesk were good). In the end, we settled for an in-house writer.

Best of luck!

Hey Eugene,

I actually had to contact Adwords myself asking for advice on how to gain a better quality score. I received quite a lengthy response that I will paste into here, I hope it can be of use.

• WHAT EXACTLY DO WE MEAN BY RELEVANCY OF A KEYWORD:

RELEVANCY OF A KEYWORD IS THE AVERAGE PERFORMANCE OF THE KEYWORD ACROSS ALL ACCOUNTS:

We look at the average CTR of the keyword in question across all accounts. CTR is used to determine the "relevance" that you see in the ads diagnostic tool. Why? The logic is that if people have clicked ads for this keyword, they must find it relevant. Otherwise, they wouldn't click. If a KW (keyword) has a bad overall CTR, it will be hard for the client to get a good QS number unless they have extremely good individual performance. Relevance, in this case, is NOT simply having the keyword on your landing page. This is a common misconception about relevance.

Relevancy is about how much users find it appropriate. In order words, how many users click on an advertiser's ad when they search for that keyword.

After thorough analysis of your account with our specialists, I have the following findings and recommendations for you:

1. CTR OF THE KEYWORD

As you can see from above points while defining the “Keyword Relevance” for a keyword we not only try to provide you with information on how “closely related” the keyword, ad and webpage are to each other/your service (defined by points 2,3 and 4) but we also try to provide signals about how good this keyword has been (in terms of performance) as a marketing keyword on google.com in general.

Please note, this keyword, I will like to confirm, has historically not performed that well in general on google.com and hence the same is reflected in the Quality Score of this keyword. However as we get more impressions and are able to keep a high CTR for this keyword in our account, this keyword’s performance in our account will start playing more significant role in terms of defining the Quality Score of this keyword and the same will improve.

2. EXACT MATCH CTR FOR KEYWORD IS LOW:

As you can see from above points (point 2) that the exact match CTR of the keyword also plays a significant role in determining the Quality Score.

I will like to inform you that besides the performance (read CTR) it is also the quantum of performance (read number of impressions) that impacts quality Score. The higher is the number of impressions you have the bigger role the CTR of that keyword will play in defining the Quality Score for that keyword. In this case, we can see that the keyword has received around 62 exact match impressions for the past 30 days, compared to around 1900 monthly exact match queries for this term, hence the CTR of the keyword is playing an important role here.

NOTE: It works both ways: that is to say a bad CTR with high impressions will impact Quality Score that badly and also a good CTR with high impressions will impact the Quality that well.

As this keyword receives around 0% of the traffic for this keyword in a month, the CTR at keyword level is not impacting the Quality Score of this keyword. However as the impressions will increase & if the CTR at keyword level is high it will have +ve impact on Quality Score.

As your Exact Match Impressions would increase and the number of clicks increases the Exact Match CTR would improve and will start impacting the quality score of the keyword positively.

3. GENERIC KEYWORD:

With broad matches, the Google AdWords system automatically runs your ads on relevant variations of your keywords, even if these terms aren't in your keyword lists. Keyword variations can include synonyms, singular/plural forms, relevant variants of your keywords, and phrases containing your keywords.